


Katniss & the Sea

by Faemonic



Category: Otherfaith Religion & Lore
Genre: Angst, Bookkeepers, F/F, Island of Women, Märchen, Polyamory, Second Person, Suicide, Sundering, The Romances, Timey-Wimey, faery fetch, timeline weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:26:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4680221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faemonic/pseuds/Faemonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I can’t undo what I haven’t done!” You shouted, striking your palm against the outer ring. "That's imposs—" (<strong>Note:</strong> This is not a <em>Hunger Games</em> crossover, even though it does end with a girl on fire.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Tower

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the tragic fairy tale romance [Corliss & the Sea](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4652268). This tower-dwelling love interest of Dahlia takes the name Katniss to reflect the difference in version, like the traditional Scottish ballad of Tam Lin has the title character rescued either by a Margaret or a Janet. Although for reasons, I wish I thought up of a plant name that begins with A as well as ends with a double S. The katniss plant is also known as the duck potato.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You are Katniss for this chapter, and the next, and the rest.

The townsfolk heard your story and decided that what you’d gone through wasn’t so bad. Each of them had been through worse and come out better, and they told you exactly how, each raising their voices over the others. The chorus drowned out the churning in your gut. It was in the past, anyway, concluded the townsfolk—but their stories were in the past, too, and by unspoken agreement, theirs deserved to be told and re-told. Yours must never be told again. 

So, you continued to tell that story without meaning to: by the constant complaints about unrelated events that might not be all that bad, or in outbursts that made no sense when you recall it after the energy to burst-out had been spent. Living becomes a pain—ulcers, headaches, the world so sharpened by terror that it slices your heart into petals—and you don’t even really know why anymore. Those who care advise you to get used to it: this is life. Those who don’t care admonish you to contain the uncontainable, and repeat: it wasn’t that bad; it wasn’t even real.

You’ve said too much, in the wrong way, or left out some crucial detail that would have moved them to respond differently. You can’t take your story back and keep it safe from their scorn and ridicule. You can’t stop the epilogue from seeping out of you like sweat and tears, but nobody else will have it.

If anyone understood, they didn’t (shouldn’t) show it. The townsfolk made an example of you.

And even that isn’t so bad. If they shunned you into poverty, or joined forces to hurt you badly enough to end this misery—then at least you could wonder if you hit a nerve and they all just didn’t want to admit that your story was true. Instead, they gave you hope of belonging in this world again. You took that hope, despite yourself.

One day, you walked the path out of town toward the surf and sunset. It never made anything better, but it looked like the thing to do to make things better (because that was what mattered.)

As you walked along the beach, the sands turned into rock, and you looked behind you and found no sands at all. Terror without cause had done its worst: though you might have cause for terror now, your body’s response felt more like thoughtless routine, and the accompanying emotion isn’t really terror at all but numbness. The shoreline took a sharp turn that you didn’t remember being there in all the time that you’d walked this stretch. There was a tower on that point, covered in vines and hardly crumbled. It must have been ancient, but you knew that it wasn’t here yesterday. It was tall enough that you would have seen it from the edge of town, or even (you phant’sy) from outer space.

Maybe the presence of the tower means that going back to town isn’t the only option anymore. It never was your only option, but you had hope, and everybody suffered for it—you most of all, as they had ways to recover, but it was suffering all the same.

Your decision to stay in this tower should have been a decision to live in it.

If you enter this tower, you’re going to die.

*

There wasn’t enough of you left to do so on purpose yet, but your true downfall began once you made the attempt. You stepped on the sill of the highest window of this tower and squinted against the wind and rain. They blurred together, the sea and sky; they blurred the jagged rocks below.

You planned to jump. Then again, you planned to walk down the sandy beach until the sun sank behind the ocean, and then return to town. You had also planned to leave the life-ruining-but-otherwise-not-that-bad event in the past.

What stops you this time? You can take another step into the sky, it stands to reason that you have enough reason to—and not enough reason not to. You haven’t been reasonable for a long while. Maybe this can be like your outbursts, only this time you only hurt yourself. Maybe you can think of it as flying. Maybe you’re just so tired that you’ll fall so finally asleep. You wonder if you can resort to slipping and falling, making an accident aligned with intent.

You’re not afraid of pain or death. I believe you. You have nothing to live for. I won’t convince you otherwise.

But you don’t do it.

Next time, maybe—ah, next time, certainly. Between now and then, you shall step down from the window. You shall move past the low-hanging and unlit chandelier, past the giant hourglass with all the sand collected at the bottom, past the shelves of books with blank pages and the vials of ink, and down the spiral staircase. The storm will calm. You shall walk the beach, and find bobbing in the shallows the body of a woman who should have lived—and there you’ll stand, on dry land, living when you should have died.

What _will_ you do, Katniss? What will you do then? 

Wade into the waters. Wrap your arms around her body and bring her head up over the waves. Breathe a sigh of relief when she gasps, coughs, vomits—even all over you. She’s alive.


	2. The Mermaid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katniss and Dahlia find a common interest.

You pressed against her side, your shoulders under her arm as you both walked back to the tower—you walking, she limping (as she had cut her leg on a rock.) On the way, you imagined the many ways that this can go wrong. People in town considered you unpleasant in publicly shared spaces. You couldn’t be a good host, you thought, because it was not in your nature. 

And that you heaved the strange woman gently onto your own bed, and bandaged her wounds, and offered her a bowl of freshwater and a towel to bathe in, and bathed her when she’d indicated that she would rather you do so, and went out in the fresh rainfall to collect enough mussels and sea urchins for two—none of that convinced you otherwise. 

Her sentences were jumbled syllables in an unfamiliar language, any single word beyond you to pick out. When you sat by the bed and offered her bowl of clams, she took your hand instead and pressed it between her breasts. 

She said, “Dahlia.” She patted your hand and repeated, loudly and slowly, “ _Daaahliiiiiaaaaaaa…_ ”

You concluded that “dahlia” meant “breastbone” in the strange woman’s strange language, but could not fathom why that would be important.

*

The books that you found in the tower had been immensely helpful during this time. People had previously inhabited this tower and wrote of events, sometimes even drawing them. The woman made some noise to catch your attention as she drew a book from the shelf nearest your bed, and you didn’t mind—it wasn’t one that you had written in yourself and wanted to keep private. 

She opened the book and looked through the pages. You recognized one page as a drawing from one of your favorite reports. When she glimpsed you hovering closer and peering over to the page, she opened the book more widely and shifted away from the edge of the bed—a mixed message to you, but she meant it as an invitation to squeeze in. 

To your surprise, she pointed at the text beside the illustration and drew her finger over the sentence, speaking as if pronouncing the words. 

At last, you come to a correct conclusion: the books are magical. The text would always be in the written form of the reader’s language. So, you point to a word in one of the sentences, and she says it in her language, and you in yours. 

This is the story that brought you together. 

A tower clerk by the name of 85493 reported the emergence of a bipedal mermaid from the waters near the tower. While most humans had aquatic apes in their ancestry, a number of merpeople kept to forms better-suited for their habitat. This was unusual. The clerks of the tower did their best to make complete accounts of all unusual activity between the faery world and the human world. Thus, the clerk followed the unusually bipedal mermaid inland, spied and eavesdropped, and returned to the tower with a report that a spell had been legally broken. By her posthumous, ghostly testimony: the mermaid had traded her everchanging rainbow tentacles for a pair of legs, in hopes of cohabiting with a human whom she had saved from a shipwreck. Unfortunately, this human opted for a monogamous cohabitation with a human woman who bore an identical resemblance to the human form of the mermaid. The mermaid wasted away in grief. The higher-ranking clerks gathered for a morbidity and morality meeting, finding fault in their fetch regulation procedures that led to the presence of both the mermaid (who had originally been human, and was a faery changeling) and the identical fetch—and thus led to such a tragedy. However: the witch who had guided this mermaid through the transformation agreed to there being no outstanding debts between them, and the mermaid’s family declined to take the witch to faery court for malpractice. The tower clerks could not conceive of a way to modify fetch regulation, or otherwise prevent such a tragic event in the future. Concerns shifted to a new event. The backwash of time had re-released aquatic reptilian megafauna in the human world, and the tower clerks began drafting petitions to the goddess Ophelia to incorporate the Cretaceous period in the West. Perhaps the introduction of these giant reptiles would somewhat fill the niche left by the dwindling number of dragons, so 85493 proposed.

For the strange life you’ve lived, Katniss, you hadn’t much imagination. You thought that this woman in your bed was a mermaid with some similar motivation, and something without yet even the form of a thought convinced you that you had put yourself in the way—that you didn’t belong in her story. 

At most, you learned Dahlia’s name.


	3. A Long While Later

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katniss and Dahlia have secrets.

One day, you sat in the shade of the tower and with a mortar and pestle pounded seaweed into mulch, preparing it to be spread out on a canvas sail, to dry in the sun. Dahlia had found the canvas, just as she had found an abandoned spider’s web in the corner of the tower, the silk still strong and the netting large enough to catch birds. She used the spiderweb to catch fish; she used a stone blade to slice the fish from belly to brain, pushed out the eyeballs with her finger and hung their eye sockets from a clothesline. The fish meat would dry in the sun. You never made fire here, but the sunlight that season would sear the stones hot enough to cook a gull’s egg in them. 

When you weren’t watching Dahlia, (because, for example, there was seaweed to mulch) you were thinking of her. While you can think of her and of mulched seaweed at the same time, you watched as she slowed the hanging-up of the fish carcasses. She gazed out onto the ocean, thinking of something else.

The canvas hadn’t been mulched, so you wrapped it around you to save you from burning up, and made your way to the beach.

You’ve spoken in a mix of both your languages enough that you’re beginning to think in a different cadence. It is in that language that you tell her: “You should go be with the ones you love, if you want them so much.”

Dahlia glanced at you with an expression of surprise, a moment later giving a flattered chuckle. She thought that you spoke in the general ‘you’ and conceptual ‘them’ rather than the direct address—and your braving the scorching heat to come by her side was some demonstrative admittance of affection.

“You’ve recovered from your injury,” you add, blushing (oh, very well, let us write that it was the sun burning your skin pink.) “There’s no reason for you to stay in the tower.”

“Is that the way of it?” Dahlia asked, a note of caution in her voice. “Only injured or ill people stay in the tower?” She continued, as if you’d answered in affirmative when you had not, “Why, I’m sorry for outstaying my welcome. I thought we lived here because we were happy.”

“Happy?” You echoed, although Dahlia had used the word in your own language for it, the idea felt unfamiliar.

She slid the last fish down the clothesline, tied the line off, and bent over to rub her hands in the dry sand. “The books,” Dahlia said at last, heading towards the tower. “They’re interesting. I could read through two or more every day until I’ve learnt all the ways of the lost people of the tower.”

“But you haven’t been doing that,” you ventured.

“That’s right. We haven’t been doing that.” She paused at the door to the tower to plant a kiss on your mouth, and the idea of happiness wasn’t so unfamiliar anymore. Happiness rose like a wave and soothed the jagged stones to sand and stone, and you realized the many of waves of it had been smoothening your edges long before you noticed. “Not often,” Dahlia says, between more kisses. “I could take forever.” When she pulls away, you follow her back into the comfortable cool darkness of the stone tower, the sea breeze whistling gently through the windows above. She asked, “What were you injured with that brought you here?”

You shrugged and turned your head aside. “I needed to be alone.”

“Did you want to be, though? Did you like…Do you prefer to be alone?” Dahlia asked with similar mildness, but as much apprehension as you hid (for unbidden wisps of memory, from the time before the tower,) she masked her own sorrows just as well.

You answered more confidently. “I would be more content with that than watching you gaze so longingly over the ocean—and insist the next moment that you’re happy staying here.”

“Oh, that!” Dahlia waved a hand dismissively and sat herself down on your bed. “I was only thinking that they would have found me before now—or I would have found them—had they lived.”

“Who?”

“My crew,” Dahlia answered shortly. She patted the corner of the cushion and said, “Come to bed, love.”

And you shed the canvas, with half a thought spared for the seaweed mulch that wasn’t very well going to dry itself into sheets, and full thoughts (several of them, complicated) spared for how you were supposed to hold another person’s tragedy—even tragedies that a person refused to hold herself.

Dahlia must have loved her crew—in different ways than you love her now, or as you loved the stars; and this crew hadn’t abandoned or turned against Dahlia, as far as you both knew, they must have died. What can anybody say to that?

Her voice thrummed through your worries, her breath cooling your neck as she stroked—as she stopped stroking your skin. “Are you still with me?”

Townsfolk had tried to make you more considerate of others. You don’t remember what made it so difficult, and a pang of remorse strikes you at the fact that it ever was.

You asked about Dahlia's crew. “Were they fishers, merchants, navy?”

“No.”

“Explorers?”

Dahlia hummed. “Close enough,” she decided. Then, “You’ve been acting strangely since I asked you why you lived alone in this tower.”

“Living alone in a tower isn’t strange behaviour by itself?”

“You may as well tell me.”

You had developed a dissatisfaction with the town, of course. No, before then… “I don’t want to talk about it.” You once thought you could never speak of the matter like so and mean it, but then you did. You embraced Dahlia closer to you and suggested that you could both continue with what you had always previously considered an act of mutual hospitality.

At that moment, however, Dahlia remembered that she had an urgent book to read; and you just as suddenly remembered the seaweed mulch, and you both agree to leave lovemaking for another time—another time that never comes.

*

The sound of turning pages echoes from the highest part of the tower to the rooms below, but you don’t see Dahlia again for the rest of the season. A number of birds make their nests higher up the tower, so you guess that Dahlia eats their eggs. You take to gathering enough mussels for one, or sitting by the window and looking at where the town used to be, (or where the town never was,) sighing with relief that you find no sign of it. 

In these days, you feel neither fear nor numbness—although a short speech and urgent leave as Dahlia’s would once have troubled and pained you. Both of you have secrets, and you decide that when she returns you can say that, respect it, instead of resorting to some nonsense about seaweed mulch.

For the rest of the season, you tried to the name the feeling that life gives you now. You find it in Dahlia’s language before your own: contentedness.

*

When the sun tucked the clouds over her face like a blanket, when the wind began to rise, when the waters began to fall from the sky…on the day of the first major storm that marked the season, Dahlia came back.


	4. The Firestorm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The original purpose of the tower is revealed.

She said that she had something to show you at the top of the tower, and you followed. “The West needed to be alone once,” Dahlia remarked as she led the ascent. “When a wicked prince from the stars drowned his sister-lover in the river Ophelia, and cut his human consort into pieces while she still lived.”

Your heart sank as you approached the room of the highest tower, and a distant rumble signaled the approach of the Thunderhorse. You stopped at the doorway, refusing to follow Dahlia any further into the room. “Have you read my diaries? Is that why you know this?”

“No,” Dahlia answered, as she walked around the low-hanging chandelier. “I read 85493’s diaries, and I survived the Sundering. I saw great orange columns of fire in the middle of the ocean where they shouldn’t be. What I hadn’t known was that there was no way to make fire in places there should be. That’s why the tower clerks have gone. That’s why my ship and crew are gone.”

“I don’t understand,” you said, curiosity finally luring you closer. The rain began to fall in torrents, blurring the sky and sea like they had the night before you met her.

Dahlia turned from the window and put both her hands on the chandelier. She declared, “There should be a fire here! During the season of the sun, we could see the edge of the world from the boat—but the storm is here, and the rocks are jagged. Light the tower, Katniss! Light the fire!”

You still don’t understand. No stones here are flint, no metals are steel. You glance at the glass globes full of sand in the corner, but to light a fire with a glass globe needs sun, and that season is past. Besides, as you say, “Hardly anybody travels these waters.” You were across Dahlia then, just within reach of the chandelier.

“I did,” Dahlia reminded you. “And I mourn the lives of lowly pirates lost because they were lives all the same. They needed this lighthouse!”

“I can’t undo what I haven’t done!” You shouted, striking your palm against the outer ring. "Make a fire? Even that's imposs—"

The chandelier came to life in a blaze that shone through the shingles of the tower roof. The sky around the island turned orange and yellow like the most brilliant of sunsets. The light burned definition into the edge of every ocean wave, each drop of rain and every jut of stone. Inside the tower, the flames streamed over you like a tide, without burning—but Dahlia had leaped back from the heat smartly…or not so smartly, for she leapt too far with the window behind her. 

You shouted Dahlia’s name, leaping over the burning chandelier to reach out the window with a grasping hand. Your fingers closed around a sleeve and you pulled—but Dahlia wore no sleeves, and her body was muscled rather than the soft flesh that you caught.

Another woman came in through the tower window in a cloud of hot mist. You tried to release her arm, but you couldn't feel your fingers. Even through her sleeve, a cold seeped from her body through to your bones. Her eyes were empty sockets like that of a drying fish, and her hair streamed behind her in clouds so black that they looked blue. She is the storm; she is the time that turns the seasons in on themselves—but most of all, now, with you, she is Death.

“So I found you,” the Ophelia said, with a voice as toneless and constant as the rainfall. 

Behind you, the sand in the hourglass began to fall upwards.

*

Dahlia awoke with a start, her heels still springing back from a fire that wasn’t there. She drew breath sharply, for a scream that didn’t leave—for she wasn’t falling into jagged rocks, but wrapped in the stillness and softness and warmth of a bed.

One of her lovers from the night before groaned and stretched. “Dahlia’s awake,” she said, voice rough with sleep. “No more excuses, everybody—up and out! We have histories to write.” Dozens of lumps beneath the sheets began to rise like waves, but instead of breaking into foam they broke into limbs and smiles and laughter. 

Dahlia rubbed her head. The one who had spoken rubbed her eyes and asked the one lying down on her opposite side, “I’m making coffee—do you want some?” The other one mumbled a reply. At that the one who had spoken turned to Dahlia and asked, “What about you? Coffee?”

Dahlia smiled and shook her head no. “Thanks for the offer, umm…0085493?”

“85494,” she corrected, and nudged her head to the one in their bed who hadn’t moved. “She’s 85493.”

“Right, sorry—oh, I might take you up on that after all,” Dahlia said. They had met in the library of the Island of Women, she remembered that much. As the room bustled with activity, Dahlia glanced out the window and was surprised to see her ship still in the habour in one piece, not wrecked by jagged rocks. Something glinted far in the horizon, between the billows of the ocean waves and sky. She unfolded her telescope, and peered through it at the glinting. It was a tower with shingles that glowed orange and yellow from within, like an ember.

“That’s where I’m going,” the voice of 85493 came from beside her, and she sighed. “Taking the whole storm season shift. Will you miss me?”

“Yes,” Dahlia replied.

85493 laughed and leaned her head on Dahlia’s shoulder, deciding that was what passed for witty repartee from Dahlia before the morning coffee was made.

But if 85493 wouldn’t offer to take Dahlia with her, then Dahlia wouldn’t follow—no matter how much the pirate captain longed to do so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fanfic heavily alludes to the human Arabella's role in the Sundering of the West, how she wandered the Appalachian mountains and found herself in Western Faery, fell ill because the faery land rejected her, and the goddess Clarene tried to save her by casting a spell to bind Arabella to the land. Instead of curing the human of the mysterious illness, Arabella was reborn as the god and firebird Laetha. Arabella's jealous lover Mircea interrupted the spell and everything got worse from then on until it got better. Mircea's sister-lover was Pallis, both being faery stars. Pallis survived the drowning and went on to become a goddess in her own right, known as the Dierne.
> 
> I created Katniss as associated with Arabella by virtue of being her _fetch_ , which is a faery duplicate of a human that...sometimes happens...because...of reasons...probably. Somehow, Katniss resides in a human town by the shore rather than the mountains. Mostly, I wanted the tower to be a lighthouse that one could do a lot more good by lighting up than trying to jump off it. When I wondered why Katniss wouldn't have lit it before Dahlia told her to, it occurred to me to make her a Laetha that didn't know she was a Laetha.
> 
> The Pirate Queen and the Lighthouse Keeper romance is an alternate universe fanfiction prompt from more than a decade ago. It stayed in my mind because I believed it would make a fantastic original fairy tale. I suppose it just went to another fandom. I had also really wanted to find a way to work the fetch phenomenon into _The Little Mermaid_ by Hans Christian Andersen, or Tchaikovsky's ballet _Swan Lake_ , both fairy tales in which the princes get confused by identical faces.
> 
> The initial inspiration was the inkling that [Corliss & the Sea](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4652268) had some clue as to the origin of the Laethelia, a syncretic god of the firebird Laetha and the goddess Ophelia. But now at the end, the Laethelia never actually featured. Whereas Corliss was more or less established as an introvert, Katniss is traumatized and finds no support with her community but recovers by the sea. And Katniss as a sorta-maybe-kinda Laetha meeting with the Ophelia might not necessarily end in such a final death but rebirth.


End file.
